PC Review: Falling Skies The Game
Thu, October 16, 2014 
Falling SKies: The Game was announced more than a year ago in a deal with Little Orbit to create titles based on the highly successful television series. At this time, Season 4 was filming and it was very unclear if the game would somehow tie-in to the show in various ways. Unfortunately, both season 4 of the show and the video game were massive disappointments.
Falling Skies: The Game, right off the bat, is a ripoff or copy of the XCOM series, sharing a huge amount of uncanny resemblance. XCOM is one of the best turn-based strategy games in the business and has a cult following. It is also met with high critical success with every turnout and has come to be one of the kings of TBS. Unfortunately, Falling Skies: The Game is nothing more than a shell of what XCOM has accomplished, taking the basic fundamentals of the franchise and adding nothing more than its own aesthetic without any flare. It's completely possible to look past the fact that it's an XCOM clone because in it's own right, it's well-developed and turn based strategy is a fantastic idea for Falling Skies and other sci-fi franchises that aren't quite action heavy because it gives an opportunity to tell a story within the levels and in-between.
Disappointly, Falling Skies once again has nothing but a shell of a story within the game. It rarely ties into the show, let alone season 4 which was filming at this point in-time and has only a handful of characters from the television series. Also, the characters have very skewed likenesses, as if they wouldn't sign over their own faces for the game or the developers just had poor modellers. Thankfully, the actors play their characters in the voice over booth providing a shred of authenticity. The skitters, mechs and every other enemy are well modeled and textured, and the game also uses some of the show's mythology in it's roots such as characters being spiked.
The gameplay in Falling Skies is fundamentally a great idea, unfortunately it's so bear and unsensational that the player can't help to feel massively bored, especially in the earlier stages in the game when the missions are just massive amounts of recon and collection with barely enough action to keep satisfied. Not to mention a complete lack of variety for animations and sound clips, hearing your generic lookalike soldiers screaming "EN ROUTAY" or "BACK TO THE GRIND" six hundred times in a mission makes you feel burnt out before you even get started. In addition to that repetitive soundclips, even when you get the rare chance to play as a television character on a story mission, they as well have recorded the same annoying dialogue clips during the levels.
Admittedly, there are moments where the game does indeed get exciting, especially when you are facing off against huge threats. High-level skills feel great to deliver but ultimately take long to recharge. Differently from XCOM, some skills are class specific such as "Overhead" where you watch for enemies in cover and automatically fire upon movement. It's hard to tell whether or not this is a good change, considering strategy has to be altered and it could theoretically improve difficulty, but the game is so blatantly easy that in the long run it doesn't matter. The levels in the game definitely feel long as you plan out how to go about it, but when you easy buy upgrades by going on a lot of recon missions, your weapons and gear make you near-invinicble in some stages of the game.
Unfortunately, there's ultimately no way to call this a great game. The word decent may suffice, but the Falling Skies license deserves better than this and the horrendously laughable season 4. This game is a great XCOM mod for those who are a cult follower of Falling Skies, but the forty dollar price tag is an abysmal joke. This game definitely needed a lot longer development time and polish as it lacks in almost all of the important areas -- Gameplay, Graphics and Sound -- and delivers next-to-nothing of originality. If you're looking for a cheap turn-based strategy, wait for a sale on XCOM Enemy Unknown instead.
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